Rebels Are Said to Defeat Syrian Forces in Battle at Border

ISTANBUL — For the second time in a week, the civil war in Syria spilled across border areas on Wednesday as rebel forces were reported to have driven government troops from a northern frontier crossing in an apparent effort to expand supply and infiltration routes in the campaign to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

Turkish schools in the region were closed for the day after intense overnight clashes in which the rebels attacked the Syrian frontier post at Tal Abyad, south of the Turkish town of Sanliurfa, according to the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency. Television images appeared to show members of the insurgent Free Syrian Army standing on the roof of the border post and hauling down the Syrian flag at Tal Abyad, which is less than a mile from Turkey’s Akcakale crossing.

A private Turkish television channel said Syrian tanks were headed for the border post. The attack came two days after Lebanese officials said that Syrian warplanes and helicopters, pursuing opposition fighters, had fired on a Lebanese town near the two countries’ shared border.

News of the rebel advance came as opposition fighters were forced to withdraw from several neighborhoods in the Damascus suburbs, ceding territory to the army after two weeks of fighting that had forced most residents to flee. Activists said the fighters, shelled for days and out of ammunition, withdrew from the neighborhoods of al-Hajjar al-Aswad and Qadam.

Photo

Civilians and rebel fighters tried to pull a body from rubble in Aleppo, Syria, on Wednesday.Credit
Zain Karam/Reuters

Elsewhere around Damascus, activists circulated images of what they said was evidence of summary executions by the government in the Jobar neighborhood. In what has become a familiar scene, the video showed at least eight men, all apparently shot in the head, lying in a basement. Another video showed five other dead men with similar head wounds lying in an apartment. The authenticity of the videos could not be independently confirmed.

Human rights groups have asserted that civilians are being increasingly caught in combat. Amnesty International said Wednesday that Syrian government forces had carried out indiscriminate air attacks and artillery strikes, apparently intended to punish civilians perceived as sympathetic to the rebels.

A report by the organization, based on visits to areas of central Syria from Aug. 31 to Sept. 11, said that while much international attention was focused on the fighting for Damascus, the capital, and Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and commercial center, “indiscriminate air bombardments and artillery strikes by the Syrian Army are killing, maiming and terrorizing the residents of Jabal al-Zawiya and other parts of the Idlib and north Hama regions.”

“Every day, civilians are killed or injured in their homes, in the street, while running for cover or trying to shelter from the bombings,” the group said. “Hundreds have been killed or injured in recent weeks, many of them children, in indiscriminate attacks.”

Ali Akbar Salehi, the foreign minister of Iran, one of Mr. Assad’s few friends in the region, met with him in Damascus on Wednesday and briefed him on a regional initiative by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran to halt the fighting, according to Syria’s state news agency. The initiative does not call for Mr. Assad to step down, a basic demand of the rebel side.

In Turkey, the military authorities said they had completed an inquiry into Syria’s downing of a Turkish warplane in June, concluding that it happened in international airspace over the Mediterranean. Syria has asserted that the plane was shot down because it violated Syrian airspace. The episode, which killed the two-man crew, escalated tensions between the neighbors.

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2012, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Syrian War Spills Over Turkish Border as Rebels Seize a Post. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe